LidRob313

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Rob

Over mijn bibliotheek

I am a reader, not a collector of books. Even so, I prefer the tactile and other sensations that we associate with actual books in preference to either the electronic or audio versions.

I have loved reading from the moment I was finally able to decipher the printed marks on the page. The first book I read in its entirety was "A Boy Sailor with John Paul Jones."

I read because I must read. I read for pleasure, entertainment, knowledge, insight and, most importantly of all, to gain an understanding of myself and the world in which we live. I don't specialize in anything although I have pronounced anglophile tendencies. My favorite source of books is The Folio Society followed by Amazon.com. My favorite publications are Granata, The New Criterion, Commentary and BBC Music.

I hope that I will hear from members who share my interests and who will share with me why they read and the titles of books which have been important to them at various points in their lives. My most important book is the classic War and Peace which I read for the first time at the age of 17 and again nearly half a century later.

As a new member I am only beginning to add the titles of books in my library and the names of my favorite authors. I am happy that a site like this exists. All the hullabaloo over the coming dominance of eBooks has made those of us who cherish "real" books to feel like the aging and clueless guardians of dusty and quaint relics of a bygone era. We can see the changes in our book stores and public libraries where books, as an object, seem destined to share the fate of recorded music. I believe books, as we know them, will survive for a variety of reasons that others have already listed. As for me, books are the air I breathe, the water I drink and the very sustenance of my soul.

Over mij

I was born in Michigan and raised in Ohio. I attended Kent State University where I majored in journalism and minored in English literature. Following graduation in 1961 I served two years as a psy ops officer in Okinawa and Thailand. While on active duty I successfully passed the written and oral examinations for the U.S. Foreign Service. In 1965I was commissioned a vice consul and third secretary and, following language training was assigned as a junior officer trainee to the American Embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Subsequent assignments took me to Vienna, Asuncion, Heidelberg, Bonn and Stuttgart. I retired from the FS in 1991. From 1986 to 2003 my wife and I lived in a restored Federal house in the Virginia hunt country. In 2003 we moved to Williamsburg, Virginia where I pursue a variety of interests to include gardening, tennis, music and antiques.

Favoriete auteurs

Anna Ahkmatova, Alexander Solzenitzen, Louis Armstrong, W. H. Auden, Jane Austen, Antony Beevor, Saul Bellow, Harold Bloom, James Boswell, Alain de Botton, Charlotte Brontë, Emily Brontë, Bill Bryson, John Buchan, Anthony Burgess, A.S. Byatt, Anton Chekhov, Agatha Christie, Paul Copperwaite, Claude Debussy, Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Dorothy Dunnett, T. S. Eliot, Patrick Leigh Fermor, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Graves, Graham Greene, Vasily Grossman, Victor Davis Hanson, Hergé, Clive James, P. D. James, Victor Klemperer, Milan Kundera, Gustav Mahler, W. Somerset Maugham, Daphne du Maurier, Nancy Mitford, Michel de Montaigne, Frederic Morton, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, V. S. Naipaul, Patrick O'Brian, Flannery O'Connor, P. J. O'Rourke, George Orwell, Edgar Allan Poe, Anthony Powell, Sergei Prokofiev, Marcel Proust, Giacomo Puccini, Alexander Pushkin, Ayn Rand, Rainer Maria Rilke, Andrew Roberts, Philip Roth, Dorothy L. Sayers, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Richard Strauss, Paul Theroux, Leo Tolstoy, William Trevor, Ivan Turgenev, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Andrzej Wajda, Evelyn Waugh, P. G. Wodehouse, Stefan Zweig

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